There are exceptions to this trend. Poland, for one, has used its influence to support reformers in other post-Soviet states like Belarus. But Poland is unusual, and by playing a limited or hostile role in international democracy promotion efforts, countries like South Africa or Brazil or Turkey have made it easier for autocratic leaders to paint democracy promotion as a Western phenomenon, and even to portray it as an illegal intervention.

For a time, this rosy line of thinking seemed warranted. In 1990, dictators still ruled most of Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia; by 2005, democracies had emerged across these continents and some of the most powerful developing nations, including South Africa and Brazil, had become solid democracies. In 2005, for the first time in history, more than half the worlds people lived under democratic systems.

The number of anecdotal examples is overwhelming. From Russia to Venezuela to Thailand to the Philippines, countries that once appeared to be developing into democracies today seem headed in the other direction. So many countries now remain stuck somewhere between authoritarianism and democracy, report Marc Plattner and Larry Diamond, co-editors of the Journal of Democracy, that it no longer seems plausible to regard [this condition] simply as a temporary stage in the process of democratic transition. Or as an activist from Burma long one of the worlds most repressive countries told me after moving to Thailand and watching that countrys democratic system disintegrate, The other countries were supposed to change Burma. … Now it seems like they are becoming like Burma.

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Stopping the global democratic reversal, then, will require giving up the assumption that democracy will simply happen on its own and instead figuring out what we can do to promote it. At the most basic level, the United States can be much less abashed in its rhetorical advocacy of democracy and much more consistent. Condemning autocracy in places like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia where the United States has significant strategic interests would help to counteract the notion that democracy is merely a concept the West wields to serve its own geopolitical aims. In addition, the United States and its allies should do more to make democracy promotion pay off for emerging powers. New democratic giants, like Brazil, should be granted more power in international institutions like the United Nations if, that is, they show a commitment to helping expand human rights and free government around the globe.

When I next met Myo, it was in Thailand two years later. Hed finally grown weary of trying to get his writing past the s and left for India, then for Thailand. Id heard that, before, India had been very welcoming to Burmese activists, particularly after 1988, Myo said, referring to a period of anti-government rioting in Burma. At one time, Indian officials had assisted Burmese democracy activists, and Indias defense minister from 1998 to 2004 was George Fernandes, a prominent human rights advocate who even gave some Burmese exiles shelter in his mily compound. By the time Myo came to India, however, Delhi had stopped criticizing the Burmese junta. Instead, it had reversed itself and was engaging the generals under a policy called Look East. When Than Shwe, the Burmese juntas leader, paid a state visit to India, he was taken to the burial site of Mahatma Gandhi, a cruelly ironic juxtaposition that Amnesty Internationals Burma specialist called entirely unpalatable. For Myo, Indias chilly new pragmatism was a shock. I expected China to work with Burma, he said. But to see it from India, it was so much more disappointing.

The middle class in Thailand had plenty of company. In 2001, urban Filipinos poured into the streets to topple President Joseph Estrada, a former actor who rose to power on his appeal to the poor, and then allegedly used his office to rake in vast sums of money from underworld gambling tycoons. In Honduras in 2009, middle-class opponents of populist President Manuel Zelaya began to protest his plans to extend his power by altering the constitution. When the military removed him in June of that year, the intervention was welcomed by many members of the urban middle class. An analysis of military coups in developing nations over the past two decades, conducted by my colleague David Silverman, found that, in nearly half of the cases drawn from Africa, Latin America, Asiaand the Middle East middle-class men and women either agitated in advance for the coup, or, after the takeover, expressed their support in polls or prominent press coverage.

Thailand offers a clear example of this phenomenon. In 2001, Thaksin Shinawatra, a former telecommunications tycoon turned populist, was elected with the largest mandate in Thai history, mostly from the poor, who, as in many developing nations, still constitute a majority of the population. Over the next five years, Thaksin enacted several policies that clearly benefited the poor, including national health insurance, but he also began to strangle Thailands institutions, threatening reporters, unleashing a war on drugs that led to unexplained shootings of political opponents, and silencing the bureaucracy. In 2005, when the charismatic prime minister won another free election with an even larger mandate, the middle class revolted, demonstrating in the streets until they paralyzed Bangkok. Finally, in September 2006, the Thai military stepped in, ousting Thaksin. When I traveled around Bangkok following the coup, young, middle-class Thais, who a generation ago had fought against military rulers, were engaged in a love-in with the troops, snapping photos of soldiers posted throughout Bangkok like they were celebrities.

To be ir, the White House has to grapple with an increasingly isolationist American public. In one poll taken in 2005, a majority of Americans said that the United States should play a role in promoting democracy elsewhere. By 2007, only 37 percent thought the United States should play this role. In a subsequent study, released in late 2009, nearly half of Americans told the Pew Research polling organization that the United States should mind its own business internationally and should let other nations work out their challenges or problems themselves. This was the highest percentage of isolationist sentiment recorded in a poll of the American public in four decades.

Right now, few of these lessons have been learned. Instead, we seem content to watch events unfold across the world and assume that things will work out for the best, because history is invariably headed in the direction of freedom. We should stop telling ourselves this comforting story and instead do what is needed to give democracy a fighting chance.

Twenty or even ten years ago, the possibility of a global democratic recession seemed impossible. It was widely assumed that, as states grew wealthier, they would develop larger middle classes. And these middle classes, according to democracy theorists like Samuel Huntington, would push for ever-greater social, political and economic freedoms. Human progress, which constantly marched forward, would spread democracy everywhere.

Why have regional democratic powers opted fomiddle eastern health practicesr this course? It seems hard to believe that a country with, say, Brazil or South Africas experience of brutal tyranny could actively abet dictators in other nations. But it now appears that the notion of absolute sovereignty, promoted by authoritarian states like China, has resonated with these democratic governments. Many of these emerging democratic powers were leading members of the non-aligned movement during the cold war and weathered Western efforts to foment coups in their countries. Today, they feel extremely uncomfortable joining any international coalition that could undermine other nations sovereignty, even if potentially for good reason. And many of these countries, such as Turkey and Indonesia and India, may simply be eager to avoid criticism of their own internal human rights abuses.

As the revolt that started this past winter in Tunisia spread to Egypt, Libya and beyond, dissidents the world over were looking to the Middle East for inspiration. In China, online activists inspired by the Arab Spring called for a jasmine revolution. In Singapore, one of the quietest countries in the world, opposition members called for an orchid evolution in the run-up to this months national elections. Perhaps as a result, those watching from the West have been positively triumphalist in their predictions. The Middle East uprisings could herald the greatest advance for human rights and freedom since the end of New Republic: Optimism Spells Democracys Decline/middle eastethe cold war, argued British Foreign Secretary William Hague. Indeed, at no point since the end of the cold war when Francis Fukuyama penned his mous essay The End of History, positing that liberal democracy was the ultimate destination for every country has there been so much optimism about the march of global freedom.

New Republic: Optimism Spells Democracys Decline/middle easte,/Iranian demonstrators sign a scroll in symbolic support of the Bahraini opposition, during a gathering at the Felestin Square in central Tehran on May 23. Anti government protests have spread across the Middle East this Spring. Some hope they will lead to increased freedom and democracy in the region.

Then there is the United States, still the most influential nation on earth. Its missteps, recently, have been serious. Barack Obamas efforts to distance himself from the Bush administration which greatly undermined Americas moral authority-have combined with the countrys weakened economic position to downgrade the importance of democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy. While Obama has delivered several speeches mentioning democracy, he has little obvious passion for the issue. When several prominent Iranian dissidents came to Washington in the summer of 2009, following the uprising in their country, they could not obtain meetings with any senior Obama administration officials. Rabeeya Kadeer, the Uighur version of the Dalai Lama, met with Bush in 2008 but found herself shunted off to low-level State Department officials by the Obama administration.

More substantively, the administration has shifted the focus of the federal bureaucracy. Though it has maintained significant budget levels for democracy promotion, it eliminated high-level positions on the National Security Council that, under Bush, had been devoted to democracy. The administration also appointed an assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor who in his previous work had been mostly focused on cleaning up Americas own abuses. This was not a bad thing the Bush administration indeed left major issues to resolve but it meant that he had r less experience than many of his predecessors with democracy promotion abroad.

/Iranian demonstrators sign a scroll in symbolic support of the Bahraini opposition, during a gathering at the Felestin Square in central Tehran on May 23. Anti government protests have spread across the Middle East this Spring. Some hope they will lead to increased freedom and democracy in the region.

Joshua Kurlantzick is Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Like Myo, many Western officials had expected that stable developing-world democracies like India, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil and Turkey would emerge as powerful advocates for democracy and human rights abroad. But as theyve gained power, these emerging democratic giants have acted more like cold-blooded realists. South Africa has for years tolerated Robert Mugabes brutal regime next door in Zimbabwe, and, in 2007, it even helped to block a U.N. resolution condemning the Burmese junta for human rights abuses. Brazil has cozied up to Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and to local autocrats like Cubas Castros. When a prominent Cuban political prisoner named Orlando Zapata Tamayo held a hunger strike and eventually died, former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva seemed to ridicule Tamayos struggle, likening the activist to a criminal who was trying to gain publicity.

Even as domestic politics in many developing nations has become less friendly to democratization, the international system too has changed, further weakening democratic hopes. The rising strength of authoritarian powers, principally China but also Russia, Saudi Arabia and other states, has helped forestall democratization. Moscow and Beijing were clearly rattled by the color revolutions of the early and mid-2000s, and they developed a number of responses. First, they tried to delegitimize the revolts by arguing that they were not genuine popular movements but actually Western attempts at regime change. Then, in nations like Cambodia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, Moscow and Beijing intervened directly in attempts to reverse democratic gains. The Kremlins youth group, Nashi, known for its aggressive tactics against democracy activists, launched branches in other Central Asian nations. In Kyrgyzstan, Russian advisers helped a series of leaders emulate the Kremlins model of political control. In part because of this Russian influence, [p]arliamentary democracy in Kyrgyzstan has been hobbled, according to the International Crisis Group. China and Russia even created new NGOs that were supposedly focused on democracy promotion. But these organizations actually offered expertise and funding to foreign leaders to help them forestall new color revolutions. In Ukraine, an organization called the Russian Press Club, run by an adviser to Putin, posed as an NGO and helped cilitate Russias involvement in Ukrainian elections.

But what about the middle class? Even if large segments of the population were uninterested in liberal democracy, werent members of the middle class supposed to act as agents of democratization, as Huntington had envisioned? Actually, the story has turned out to be quite a bit more complicated. In country after country, a miliar pattern has repeated itself: The middle class has indeed reacted negatively to populist leaders who appeared to be sliding into authoritarianism; but rather than work to defeat these leaders at the ballot box or strengthen the institutions that could hold them in check, they have ended up supporting military coups or other undemocratic measures.

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But it wasnt just leaders who were driving these changes. In some cases, the people themselves seemed to acquiesce in their countries slide away from free and open government. In one study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, only 16 percent of Russians said it was very important that their nation be governed democratically. The regular Afrobarometer survey of the African continent has found declining levels of support for democracy in many key countries. And in Guatemala, Paraguay, Colombia, Peru, Honduras and Nicaragua, either a minority or only a small majority of people think democracy is preferable to any other type of government. Even in East Asia, one of the most democratic regions of the world, polls show rising dissatisction with democracy. In ct, several countries in the region have developed what Yu-tzung Chang, Yunhan Zhu and Chong-min Park, who studied data from the regular Asian Barometer surveys, have termed authoritarian nostalgia. Few of the regions former authoritarian regimes have been thoroughly discredited, they write, noting that the regions average score for commitment to democracy, judged by a range of responses to surveys, has recently llen.

But China and Russia are only part of the story. In many ways, the biggest culprits have actually been stable democracies. Consider the case of Myo, a Burmese publisher and activist who I met four years ago in a dingy noodle shop in Rangoon. The educated son of a relatively well-off Burmese mily, he told me he had been working for a publishing company in Rangoon, but had to smuggle political messages into pieces he published in magazines that focused on safe topics like soccer or Burmese rap. Its kind of a game everyone here plays, he explained, but after a while it gets so tiring.

There is an obvious appeal to the constantly touted notion that the march of human freedom is inevitable. But not only is it -minded to treat history as a story with a preordained happy ending; it is also, for those who truly want to see democracy spread, extraordinarily dangerous. After all, if democracy is bound to triumph, then theres no reason to work too hard at promoting it. This overconfidence can spread to developing nations themselves, lulling democrats into a lse sense of security once an election has finally been held, and dissuading them from building the institutions that are necessary to keep a country free over the long-term. Democracy is not a thing: Its a complex system of strong institutions and legal checks. Very few nations have mastered it fully. And sustaining it is a never-ending effort.

Then, something odd and unexpected began to happen. It started when some of the leaders who had emerged in these countries seemed to morph into elected autocrats once they got into office. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is now essentially an elected dictator. In Ecuador, elected President Rael Correa, who has displayed a strong authoritarian streak, recently won legislation that would grant him expansive new powers. In Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who led the 2005 Tulip Revolution, soon proved himself nearly as authoritarian as his predecessor. And, in Russia, Vladimir Putin used the power he won in elections to essentially dismantle the countrys democracy.

If only things were so . The truth is that the Arab Spring is something of a smokescreen for what is taking place in the world as a whole. Around the globe, it is democratic meltdowns, not democratic revolutions, that are now the norm. (And even countries like Egypt and Tunisia, while certainly freer today than they were a year ago, are hardly guaranteed to replace their autocrats with real democracies.) In its most recent annual survey, the monitoring group Freedom House found that global freedom plummeted for the fifth year in a row, the longest continuous decline in nearly 40 years. It pointed out that most authoritarian nations had become even more repressive, that the decline in freedom was most pronounced among the middle ground of nations countries that have begun democratizing but are not solid and stable democracies and that the number of electoral democracies currently stands at its lowest point since 1995. Meanwhile, another recent survey, compiled by Germanys Bertelsmann Foundation, spoke of a gradual qualitative erosion of democracy and concluded that the number of highly defective democracies democracies so flawed that they are close to being iled states, autocracies or both had doubled between 2006 and 2010.

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